Animal Crossing Reveals Surprise Collab Coming To The Game This Week

Animal Crossing: New Horizons players are being treated to a brand new collaboration courtesy of ice cream franchise Baskin-Robbins.

Baskin-Robbins has announced “31 Ice Cream Island”, a new Dream Island themed around the restaurant, which will be available later this week for Animal Crossing players to access.

As revealed in the images made on Baskin-Robbins’ social media, the Dream Island features a courtyard with a flower garden, a fountain, and a square bearing the iconic Baskin-Robbins logo.

There’s also a series of props set up to resemble a Baskin-Robbins restaurant, complete with a vending machine and a bench bearing the logo. The player who designed the island is also wearing a Baskin-Robbins staff uniform.

The collaboration is set to go live on July 1, with Dream Addresses and design codes being sent out to players from that date.

At the moment, the collaboration has only been announced on Japanese social media pages, translated for English-speaking audiences, and has not yet been announced on Baskin-Robbins' other social media channels. This may change as the week goes on, though.

It’s a cute concept, but quite a surprising collaboration to see in the year of our lord 2026. Baskin-Robbins is certainly an appropriate brand to collaborate with the game, but it seems like something that should have happened in 2020 when the game’s player base was at its peak.

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In 2020 and 2021, plenty of brands and businesses were creating their own islands in Animal Crossing: New Horizons to promote themselves.

Brands appropriate for the Animal Crossing community, like Sanrio, H&M, and Uniqlo, had previously featured in the game, bringing about a unique way of marketing their products that was fun and innovative.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released in March 2020. Its release coincided with many countries going into lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In its first year of release, New Horizons had sold more than 32.63 million copies, grossing around $2 billion. The number of sold units reached 34.85 million after the 2.0 update was released in November 2021.

A year after that, it was reported that Animal Crossing: New Horizons had become the number one bestselling video game of all time in Japan. By March 2026, the game had sold 49.91 million copies.

Given the game’s popularity, it’s no surprise that it returned earlier this year to celebrate the franchise’s 30th anniversary with a new Switch 2 version of the game, introducing a new free expansion, updated visuals, and new collaboration items with Lego, The Legend of Zelda, and Splatoon.

This does beg the question of when the next Animal Crossing game will be released. It’s been six years since New Horizons came out, and the time between Animal Crossing: New Leaf and New Horizons was around eight years, so we might be due for a new game soon.

With Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream and Pokémon Pokopia filling the cosy life sim RPG genre for Nintendo right now, though, it’s possible we might not see a new Animal Crossing for quite some time.